greygirlbeast: (Default)
Okay, let's get this over and done with, and then we may proceed to your regularly scheduled blog entry. I expect it will be less painful that way. Well, less painful for me at least, and I know I'll be loads less distracted:

Booya! )


That said...or shown, or both, whatever...you know the lousy thing about incredible shit happening yesterday? The lousy thing about incredible shit having happened yesterday is that it's not happening today. Nonetheless, today I can lift up the blackness enough to peer out (though I do squint something fierce).

But, still, comment, kittens. And thank you for yesterday's comments.

Yesterday, we read chapters One and Two of Blood Oranges, and I can say, with great relief, that I still like this book a lot. It's about as far from The Red Tree and The Drowning Girl: A Memoir as you can get, but that's not a bad thing. I think I'd reached a point where I had to write something just for fucking fun. And Blood Oranges is fun. And it's even funny. I never fucking knew I had all this fucking funny in me. It's like discovering a strange boil behind your ear, and someone lances it, and out comes humor. I mean "ha ha" humor, not aqueous humour – though lancing a boil behind your ear and getting aqueous humour would be interesting. Anyway, with luck, the manuscript will be proofread and corrected and in Manhattan on Monday morning. I've dragged my feet on getting it to my publisher and editor. Well, no, I haven't. I've been too busy with my work for No Such Agency, and with Sirenia Digest, and with the trailer/still-photo project for The Drowning Girl: A Memoir that Blood Oranges just...sort of got lost in the shuffle. But now it's unlost. Today, we do chapters Three and Four, which will put us halfway through the novel.

I think I've decided to keep Kermit the iPad. He proved himself very useful editing yesterday. And so I'm rethinking this whole thing. But thank you, Cliff Miller. Thank you all the same.

Also, I saw a rough cut of the teaser for the trailer for The Drowning Girl: A Memoir yesterday, and it's all I can do not to link to it here. Imagine the lovechild of Terrance Malick and David Lynch, and you're in the neighborhood. Thank you, Brian and Kyle. This is going to be so fucking wonderful. I also spoke with [livejournal.com profile] kylecassidy and [livejournal.com profile] kambriel yesterday about shooting additional footage this winter in Philadelphia, and it seems like it'll happen. We'll be holding eBay auctions, props and such (a large moonstone signed by the whole cast & crew, etc.) from the first shoot, to fund that, and I'll keep you posted. Thing is, to quote Imp:

“I’m going to write a ghost story now,” she typed.
“A ghost story with a mermaid and a wolf,” she also typed.
I also typed.


Well, we have tons of mermaid/water footage, the Saltonstall stuff, but the wolf part has been sorely neglected, and for that we need winter, and snow, and a big wolf-like dog for the Perrault stuff, and we can make these things happen this winter in Philadelphia. So, yeah. Another shoot lies ahead. Which fills me not in the least with dread. It pleases me.

Last night, we proved that one meatloaf can be stretched out over four dinners and one midnight sandwich. Spooky has some mean Loaf Fu. We played some Rift. I'm obsessed with getting Selwynn glorified with the Icewatch in Iron Pine Peak, so...lots of dailies. Or, in my case, nightlies. Later, I read aloud to Spooky from John Steinbeck's The Log From the Sea of Cortez. Despite my love for Steinbeck and his Cannery Row books, I've never read this book, but found an old copy at Spooky's parents and borrowed it on Sunday (a copy that sold new in trade paperback for $1.45 in 1962). It begins with Steinbeck's "About Ed Ricketts" essay/eulogy, and, so far, I've managed not to cry. In another life, I might have been someone as good and useful to the world as Ed Ricketts. I like to think that.

It occurs to me, apropos of nothing in particular, that there's no point whatsoever in having a cake if you can't eat it, too.

Wanting Cake, Black Forest,
Aunt Beast
greygirlbeast: (walter3)
The heat comes back today. And we have a yellow air alert. The public transit system is running for free in hopes of discouraging drivers. In Birmingham and Atlanta, "yellow-alert air" is what Coca Cola bottles and sells for the three months of red air alerts that are the summer. Regardless, we will not be joining the hordes of skanky tourists filing to and back from the beaches.

Yesterday was a rather exceptional writing day. I did 1,844 words on the Next New Novel. More importantly, I think I finally found my way into this book that's been eluding me for the better part of a year. Which leads to the announcement about the novel that I've been avoiding making. Remember when I said that there was a sort of impromptu workshop late one night at Readercon 21, during which lots of folks (Sonya Taaffe, Geoffrey Goodwin, Michael Cisco, Greer Gilman, Erik Amundsen, and Gemma Files) helped me talk through some of the Big Problems I was having with it? Actually, looking back, it was really more like a literary intervention.

This arose, basically, from realizing that the "werewolf" book I was trying (and failing) to write could just as easily be a "mermaid" book. That the story would hardly change at all, swapping the wolf for a siren, and that several of the narrative problems I was having would be eliminated by jettisoning the wolf. Plus, there's my strong affinity to the sea to help drive the book. And so, that Saturday night, that Sunday morning, I made the decision.

And The Wolf Who Cried Girl became The Drowning Girl.

My only real regret is losing the original title, but I did use it for a short story long before I began trying to write the "werewolf" novel. (Note: There's a reason for those quotations marks. The "werewolf" in The Wolf Who Cried Girl was to have been about as close to people's conceptions of a traditional werewolf as the eponymous tree of The Red Tree is to traditional vampires. Likewise with the "mermaid" of The Drowning Girl, which begins not at the ocean, but a river in Massachusetts. Well, actually, it begins in an art museum.

Anyway, yes. The Next New Novel has undergone a necessary metamorphosis. Though, I will, in some sense, be preserving elements of The Wolf Who Cried Girl within The Drowning Girl, perhaps as an Albert Perrault exhibition.

Not much else to say about yesterday. But do please have a look at the current eBay auctions. Thanks.

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Caitlín R. Kiernan

February 2012

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